276°
Posted 20 hours ago

God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Stavrakopoulou’s thesis is that even during the six centuries over which the books of the Old Testament were written, the immense physicality of this wilder divinity was being erased, not least under the sway of Platonism. “Reverence rather requires . . . an allegorical meaning,” Clement of Alexandria wrote around the turn of the second century CE, expressing a scholarly distaste for the experiential and somatic that remains highly influential. Translators, too, have long sanitised the text, privileging the abstract and metaphysical over the corporeal. But this more primal, vital Yahweh can be reconstructed from scattered passages in the Bible which still retain warm traces of his divine materiality.

And I, God, said unto mine Only Begotten, which was with me from the beginning: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and it was so. … And I, God, created man in mine own image, in the image of mine Only Begotten created I him; male and female created I them. (Moses 2:26–27) As an undergraduate, Francesca Stavrakopoulou observed “lots of biblical texts suggest that God is masculine, with a male body” and was told by her theology professor that these texts were metaphorical, or poetic. “We shouldn’t get too distracted by references to his body,” her professor asserted, because to do so would be “to engage too simplistically with the biblical texts”.What does she say about the modern debate about statues? Does he ask whether we should be putting them up and what they mean and all that sort of thing? Does she have a particular take on that? Ottoman tentacles stretched everywhere, not just politically, but also commercially. They controlled major trade routes by land and sea. This book delves deep into primary and secondary historical sources, but it is written very clearly and accessibly and will be accessible to general readers as well as scholars and students. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Hugh B. Brown, “ The Gospel Is for All Men,” April 1969 general conference, online at scripture.byu.edu.

See Alon Goshen Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review87, no. 2 (1994): 171–195; DavidL. Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses,” Harvard Theological Review83, no. 2 (1990): 105–116; CarlW. Griffin and David L. Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” Harvard Theological Review95, no. 1 (2002): 97–118. Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 6:191–194. As Stavrakopoulou notes, at some point in the history of what became Israel, Hebrew mythology identified the high god, El, with his more active deputy. No one is quite sure, but this seems to be happening well before the great disruption of the Babylonian conquest in the sixth century BCE, though the traces of the older distinction can be seen in some rather laboured passages in Genesis and Exodus where a shift in the divine name has to be explained. On the one hand, this means that the biblical god acquires a double set of robustly physical divine attributes – the more sedentary splendours of the enthroned High God as well as the active and violent characteristics of the warrior storm-god. On the other, it reinforces the sense that the supreme divine power can be the subject of diverse attributes; God is less obviously a straightforwardly amplified physical being, a “big man” – though this does not mean that he loses some of his more toxic gendered qualities. The Book of Mormon and the book of Moses were translated in 1829 and 1830, respectively. 4Thus, humanity’s physical resemblance to deity was one of the earliest truths restored in modern times—a truth which Joseph Smith himself surely understood even earlier thanks to his First Vision. 5

Music choices include Tallis, Beethoven, Elgar, and Handel’s portrayal of her favourite Biblical heroine, Athalia.

Stavrakopoulou’s relationship to her evidence shows her respectful and intrigued attitude. For example, she mentions walking barefoot around the footprints at the ‘Ain Dara temple. She draws readers, on multiple occasions, into a “narrative” about the evidence in hand — for example, about the clay ossuary from Pequ‘in — a beautiful way to contextualise or capture readers’ imaginations. The humour of the writing also makes it an entertaining read, and a welcome break from academic writing that is dry, stuffy, and pedantic. Many of the texts in the Hebrew Bible problematically depict Israel as a woman, using sexualised metaphors — for example, equating idolatry with adultery, or worship of other gods with prostitution. Regularly, macho, hyper-masculine depiction of Yahweh, couched in sexualised language, occurs. Stavrakopoulou is right to point out that there are problems. Biblical scholars have a responsibility to steward, or curate, the biblical texts carefully, and to read ethically.After all, what is it that comes below the hands, resting there at a man’s sides, but above his thighs? Stavrakopopoulou, smartly adducing support from the learned Daniel Boyarin, infers from this jewel-studded evocation of a nude male lover that a comparably jewel-studded sculpture of the nude male Yahweh once stood in the Jerusalem Temple. She draws repeatedly not just on her close reading of the Hebrew but also on her wide and resourceful use of relevant and surprisingly copious lexical and archaeological work done just since the turn of the millennium. For instance, one Jewish scholar reasoned that being in “the image of God” only entails a variety of abstract (non-physical) qualities: “all those faculties and gifts of character that distinguish man from the beast,” such as “intellect, free will, self-awareness, consciousness of the existence of others, conscience, responsibility, and self-control.” 2Similarly, a Christian scholar concluded that “it implies that it is those human characteristics that enable him to fulfill his duty of ruling the earth.” 3Neither scholar mentions or implies physical, bodily form as being part of God’s image.

What the judges said: “An engaging and often moving account of how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. A sparkling book.” Francesca Stavrakopoulou is fascinated by the Bible, and she’s a leading scholar of those ancient texts which have so profoundly shaped how we see the world. She’s Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter; she’s also a convinced and passionate atheist. She is the author of several books about the Bible, and her most recent is her most daring: called “God: An Anatomy”, it draws on the Bible to describe the body of God, from head to foot, in a way she herself describes as “very controversial”. Here, the premortal Christ reveals that humanity was created in the image of His spirit body, which has the same form and appearance as His future body of flesh. Similarly, Joseph Smith’s inspired revision of Genesis 1:26–27, now canonized as part of the book of Moses, indicates that humankind is in the image of the premortal Christ, who in turn is Himself in the image of the Father: In any case, what about Eve’s prior baby-making with Adam? Where, or when, did he come in? This gets glossed over as Stavrakopoulou soars wildly on into speculations about the name “Eve” as merely a title for the goddess Asherah, Asherah being Hebrew for Athirat, the spouse of the pan-Semitic high god El, and El being functionally identical with Yahweh. She infers far too much, but as for the key translation itself, she has warrant for what she does. I really loved this book. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at a British university who occasionally makes programmes for TV.Of all these six books this one is the most accessible to the general reader. It is fascinating. It examines the fate of fallen statues of famous figures from the past. The first of these will explore History and Science and History, Empires and Global Histories, with panellists including historians Olivette Otele and Sanjoy Bhattacharya, previous Wolfson History Prize winner Sudhir Hazareesingh, shortlisted authors Toby Green and Lindsey Fitzharris, and chair of judges David Cannadine. Professor Carol Gilligan’s theory, the ethics of care, provides a critique of deontological and consequential theories. For example, questioning whether actions are right if they can be universalised, or if they benefit the majority. She suggests instead this should be based on whether it responds to the needs of individuals, even if this means we act differently towards others in the same situation. Anything but distracted by biblical references to God’s body, Stavrakopoulou is aesthetically entranced by them and programmatically attentive to their iconographic and literary contexts from ancient southwest Asia in the fourth millennium BCE to Christian and Jewish Europe as late as the 16th century. Her work, true to its subtitle, is anatomically organised into five parts and an epilogue: I, Feet and Legs; II, Genitals; III, Torso; IV, Arms and Hands; V, Head. Each of these comprises three or four chapters, each with its own fresh emphasis and coherence. “Head”, for example, has separate chapters for ears, nose and mouth. This was a great book in many ways, but a nagging issue, an overemphasis on one talking point, and what I believe is an incorrect interpretation of the Book of Job in the last chapter ultimately cost it a star. I’d rate this 3 1/2 if you let me be precise. (Since we can't do half stars, and the average rating is even higher on Yellow Satan than here, it got 3 stars there, and I reserve the right to downgrade the 4-star here.)

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment